Waiting For Change in Education

A moving critique of American education, “Waiting for Superman” poignantly illustrates some critical shortfalls of our education system. The film largely focuses on low teacher quality, pinpointing tenure as a disincentive for K-12 teachers to strive for high performance and stringent union contracts as an impediment to firing ineffective teachers. From its portrayal of union leader Randi Weingarten as a rabble-rousing demagogue and past U.S. presidents as daft and ineffective policymakers, the film implicitly suggests unions and the government are to blame for the status quo. According to one impassioned interviewee, “[t]eachers unions are…a menace…an impediment to reform.”

Indeed, increasing teacher effectiveness is essential to providing all students with a quality education. But the film does not provide substantive solutions to bring high-quality instruction to every classroom; instead, it paints a dim picture of public education and plants the unrealistic hope that the model of a few highly effective charter schools can be brought to scale. In reality, our education system faces deeply entrenched challenges that cannot solely be addressed by altering union contracts and creating more charter schools. Effective systemic change requires improved teacher training and development, nationally standardized benchmarks for achievement, and additional innovations to close our race and class-based achievement gap.

A key challenge in improving American education is increasing the quality of instruction.

While top-performing education systems like those in Finland, South Korea, and Singapore recruit their teachers from the top third of college graduates, the U.S. draws most teachers from the bottom two-thirds and, moreover, fails to rigorously evaluate teacher performance. A first step to increasing instructional efficacy is establishing an appropriate philosophy of pedagogy.

A pedagogical approach that portrays learners as passive subjects—what education activist Paulo Freire called the “banking” approach to education—contradicts the modern philosophy of education, which seeks to engage students with the world through critical thinking. In his book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Freire calls the “banking” approach oppressive and dehumanizing; in the modern day, it is also problematic because it fails to teach children the critical thinking skills needed in an innovating economy. In addition to rejecting this antiquated theory of pedagogy, our education system must improve its teacher training, development, and assessment programs. Finland, Korea, and Singapore have standardized, state-run teacher training institutions that recruit top undergraduates and often fund their teacher training.

According to “The Flat World and Education,” teachers in Singapore receive 100 hours per year of government-funded professional development, and they spend 20 hours each week collaborating with other teachers. These types of highly-developed teacher training institutions and government supports for teacher development do not exist in the United States.

The lack of comprehensive national benchmarks defining and regulating student achievement also compromises educational equity. Since the federal government does not dictate holistic national educational standards and curricula, states create their own achievement benchmarks that can vary drastically. In “Waiting for Superman,” one distressing scene portrays this imbroglio with a map showing that school districts receive funding from the national, state, and local levels. This forces districts to navigate a tangle of regulations, and the lack of standardization means school districts receive unequal funding and strive for different educational benchmarks. Additionally, since states define academic proficiency differently, students across the nation can receive very different educations. In Finland, the world’s top-performing education system, national regulations and a universal curriculum guide all teachers in designing standardized lesson plans. This contributes to the nation’s remarkably small achievement gap among schools. In America, states’ disparate standards result in unequal academic achievement across the nation.

“Waiting for Superman” also briefly mentions the problematic practice of tracking, or assigning students to different academic tracks based on determinations of ability that can often be unfair or arbitrary. Among the movie’s five students entering the lottery for charter schools, an eighth-grade girl seeks to enter Summit Prep, which is unique because it does not track students and instead strives to provide all its students with the same education. According to a Summit Prep teacher, the school wants “to hold them all to the same high standard.” Interestingly, Finland abolished tracking in the 1980s, a change that researcher Pasi Sahlberg believes may explain why Finland has the smallest achievement gap of all OECD countries. Perhaps the American education system would also benefit from re-evaluating policies that separate students by ability groups.

It is evident that the American education system faces an array of challenges to improving educational achievement and equity. The work done by the handful of educational leaders who are implementing innovative policies is critical to fixing our system. But relying on the Michelle A. Rhees, the Arne Duncans, and other supermen of education is not enough. America must wholly dedicate itself to reforming academic standards, better preparing teachers, and providing all students with equal educational opportunities. Only then will we see true change.

Niharika S. Jain ’12 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House.